


Alien Nation

by whataslydog



Category: Because the Internet, Childish Gambino - Fandom, Donald Glover - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Depressing, Depression, F/M, New York City, Original Character(s), Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Sad, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Surreal, Travel, suicidal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-24
Updated: 2015-06-23
Packaged: 2018-04-05 21:43:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4195950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whataslydog/pseuds/whataslydog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Boy is still something like depressed, something like alone, and something like floating through his life. When nothing feels like anything, what's a boy to do? </p><p>Get the hell out of Dodge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

There are still a few things left to like in the world but the feeling never lasts. The Boy was someone born with wealth. His father had been a hustler of purely legal means but a hustler nonetheless. He’d never learned what it felt like to want something and not be able to get it, not for the longest time. The problem with this much money is that you just end up wanting bigger things. When a private island seems just out of the realm of your means, it still seems possible, a dream for the one-day and maybe-laters. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck, it’s just a pretty picture – not something to strive for.  
There are still a few things in the world left to like and most of them can be bought easily if you have enough money, which he still did even with his dad gone and his mother sick but the feeling never lasted and he was, frankly, exhausted from running for days on a treadmill of hedonism. Mr. Going-through-the-motions stepping off the treadmill? Impossible. He fell off, stumbled like his legs were about to collapse beneath him (maybe they were), and almost busted his ass tripping over a few dumbbells on his way out the door.  
He never did like gyms.  
You spend your whole life in the human equivalent of a hamster wheel and when you get off of it, muscles aching and tired, you don’t really know what to do with yourself. What do you do if you aren’t trying to be happy or productive or trying to fight your own brain? What do you do when you don’t want to die but you don’t want to live either? Indifference on a massive scale. When you’re not ready to kill yourself, you kill time. He blew a fifty on snacks, beer and cigarettes at the bodega three blocks from his house because he didn’t feel like walking another four blocks to a real grocery store.  
He was a Jersey boy by nature, adopted by the big city. Did the Palisades even count as Jersey? Technically he was from New Jersey but it was like calling yourself a New Yorker when you live in the Hamptons. No one believes you when you say it. You just end up looking like a chump.  
The city, he thought, was underappreciated during this time of the year. Everything was gray, the sidewalks, the buildings, the sky. The whole city looked unwell somehow. The pretenses were lost up here. Sure Rockefeller and Times Square would be as shiny and desperately clinging to notions of glamour as ever but winters turned Harlem into a graveyard. It was more honest up here. Miserable looking people, eyes watering from the cold in bulky, thick coats braced their shoulders against the wind and half ran, half sauntered to wherever the hell they were going. OK, so maybe not all the pretenses were gone. But it was progress. Progress from the masses of people pretending everything was okay. The Boy had never been one of those people that tries to act sober when they aren’t. He never understood people who did that. He would tease his girlfriend in college about the way she would purse her lips when she was drink, thinking that if she acted like she was haughty and in a constant state of being pissed off she might seem like she was sober enough to be taken seriously. Do these people realize how stupid they look? Do they really think no one can see through them?  
Her name was Natalie DeMarco. She was tall and light, which sounds like a weird way to describe someone but that’s who she was. She was proud of it, he thought. She worked hard to be light and she wore it well. She had light skin, light eyes and a light, airy voice. Her skin shone in a way she said meant the sun was shining within her. And she was thin, literally light, in the way that was fashionable back then, a healthier looking version of heroin-chic. You have to be careful of the ones who are proud of it.  
The Boy turned left instead of right and ended up in Central Park after a few blocks. It occurred to him, briefly, that it was probably a bad idea to wander through the park at night. NYPD didn’t find bodies here often but that probably had more to do with them not caring enough to look for them than sheer absence. He meditated on this for a second and realized he didn’t care. Would it be a bullshit line to say “we’re dying slowly all the time”? Doesn’t matter if you do it tonight at the edge of some homeless guys pocket-knife in the middle of central park. It was more indifference than anything. He wanted to sit in the park more than he wanted to live so he found a bench and pulled out a cigarette and a lighter.


	2. Chapter Two

He used to fantasize about running away. No, that wasn’t the right word. Leaving? Traveling. But you know, without telling anyone where he was going. He’d fool around, fantasizing, checking his bank balance and then Greyhound and Expedia. What was the cheapest way to get to Seattle? He’d always liked Nirvana. He thought he’d like Seattle. It was always raining there but he thought he’d look all right in flannel. That was enough, he thought. It could be better. That was enough. He had always had enough money to get there but not enough to live once he arrived, not without tipping his parents off to where he was. He’d have to use a credit card and they’d find him quicker than he had the chance to say ‘flayed buttocks’. He didn’t much like the idea of being on the lam. Eventually, he realized it was all the same. El Paso, Seattle, Chicago, St. Louis…It didn’t matter where he went because it would still be him.   
But it was different now. It wasn’t about fixing any of this. It was about doing stuff for the purpose of having done stuff. His boredom with this city was nearly tangible at this point. He pulled up Greyhound’s website on his phone and browsed. Austin? He could just get on the subway and head to Williamsburg if he wanted to hang out with a bunch of hipsters. Wisconsin? Well, he did like cheese… Nah. San Diego? He’d always thought surfing looked cool. Could you surf in San Diego? Also, there was Carmen San Diego? So that was cool. He booked the ticket for a five am bus and starting the walk home.


	3. Chapter Three

He never had any respect for the people who turn their hate outward. There’s more dignity on tearing yourself to pieces, a silent and beautiful implosion. They say there’s no sound in space, right? It’s like the difference between a supernova and an H-bomb. No one every looked at the destruction in Hiroshima and called it beauty. It was still stupid. Don’t get me wrong. Please go seek help if you’re feeling suicidal and all that PSA bullshit but it just felt a little less stupid than acting like your own shit was someone else’s problem. He never understood how people could pretend like that.  
I don’t know what I’m talking about.   
He didn’t know what to pack. He didn’t know if he was coming back. He could keep paying the rent in this shitty apartment for an eternity and it wouldn’t matter. He just didn’t know if he wanted to know he could always come back if I wanted to. That this was just some impulsive and immature vacation, the type of thing people do because they’re rich and unattached and because they can. He wanted it to mean something.   
No. It meant nothing. He wasn’t doing a Beat Generation, go out and find yourself in “AMERICA: THE BRAVE AND BEAUTIFUL!!!” It was a way to kill time.  
That’s kind of the trouble with picking a bus four hours in advance: packing is a bitch. He decides he’ll send word back. Maybe Fam can pack this stuff up and- He stops dead in his tracks and looks back at the mess of clothes and electronics scattered around his living room. Or not. Wonder if Ms. Benidiba would take his PS4 and worn out Vans as an acceptable replacement for his deposit but he guesses not. There was a difference between being decisive and being impulsive. He always had trouble getting the first one down.   
He was done packing with two hours to spare. New York is the city that never sleeps as long as you live below 50th. He decides to walk it. The city streets are deceptive. You walk twenty blocks and it’s hardly even a mile. He sees no one in sight, not one sluggish town car looking to pick up and easy fare where there isn’t much competition (or demand), and no buses. He likes the city like this. If he wasn’t afraid of being stabbed he would walk around like this all the time. He meditated on that for a minute and decided to go back inside and call a cab.   
He still couldn’t get over the fact that the new taxis were green. I mean he got the idea. It’s “green,” like it’s good for the earth too but damn they were ugly. He slid in and tapped his fingers idly against the inside of the door as the driver pulled away from the curb.  
He couldn’t swim. Not really. He took a few lessons when I was seven but he kept drowning so he stopped. He knew. Don’t say it. He already knew. That that makes this even stupider. That he was travelling to the other side of the country solely because they had waves and Carmen Sandiego but he couldn’t use the former and obviously Carmen Sandiego isn’t real. So…he had no reason. Stop trying to make it mean something, he told himself sharply. He’d packed his trunks. Which…can you even wear swim trunks in waters like these? Don’t you need a wetsuit or something? Was he going to end up surfing naked and being arrested for indecent exposure? Whatever. He’d buy a wetsuit in California. That wasn’t the point. The point was he was doing this. He’d gotten in the car. He’d paid for the ticket. He’d find out if he was stupid when he got there. He downs the last of his beers that he had not so surreptitiously snuck into the front seat and kisses Manhattan goodbye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eek. Found a couple of first person pronouns in her from before I switched the narrative to the third person. If you find any, just know it is a typo. Enjoy!


	4. Chapter Four

He never stopped feeling guilty about leaving his mother behind. She had been sick for a long time, had needed him to lean on for a long time. He always thought she was so strong when he was young, that’d he’d need her help forever. Turned out not to be the case. That’s what getting old is about, right? They had enough money that he didn’t have to be in the city, ostensibly working, ostensibly trying to make something of himself but it made her happy to think he was. Almost happy enough to make up for the fact that he was never around. That’s the problem with being an only child. You can’t disappoint because you’re the only one they invested in. Everything is riding on you.   
He’d come back and visit soon. Send her a video message at least. Call her on the phone. Something. Maybe he’d say he’d gotten a good job and had a business trip. Maybe he’d send her a postcard and a souvenir to show he cared. He had always been a bad liar and she always saw right through him. But it was better than nothing.  
It was a two and a half day trip from New York to San Diego on the bus with a lot of stops. He put an address tag on his luggage just in case. These were his last things in the world. It would be inconvenient to lose them.


	5. Chapter Five

He had wanted to kill time. Now he had three days, or two days, twenty-one hours and twenty minutes, if he wanted to be exact, which he was sure the bus drivers would not.   
 

**Author's Note:**

> This is something I wrote months ago and suddenly felt compelled to post. This is a fic based on Childish Gambino's screenplay that accompanied his album Because the Internet. I really liked the themes of alienation in the original work and the character's almost dissociative levels of disinterest in many things happening to and around him but the obvious strong emotions underneath that. I hoped to bring that into this fic. I hope you enjoy!


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